Thinfilm CEO Davor Sutija Wants Your Stuff To Talk To You

Alex Knapp
,
Forbes Staff
I write about the future of science, technology, and culture.

Thinfilm CEO Davor Sutija

Norwegian company Thinfilm has been making headlines for its unique technology - a low-power, printed, rewritable memory that doesn't use any silicon. Instead, it uses a polymer material to not only store information, but also enable that information to be rewritten. Particularly fascinating about their technology is that it doesn't depend on active circuitry, and it's non-toxic. These two things mean that, for a very low-cost, Thinfilm can combine its technology to give virtually everything a memory - from the bananas at the supermarket to your toaster to your kids' toys.

"We hope to build a Lord of the Rings experience," Thinfilm CEO Davor Sutija told me. "In the books, every stone and tree has distinct personality. That world seems magical because inanimate objects are intelligent. With our technology, we can do the same thing - which allows us to live in a more connected world."

What Thinfilm is working towards is a world where virtually every item that we use is tagged with memory and sensors, harvesting information locally that can then be gathered at leisure.

"For example," Sutija says. "Think of your car. Right now you rely on a maintenance schedule for replacements, repairs, service, etc. But imagine that the individual components of your car can be tagged - your brakes can tell you when they need to be replaced by using its own sensors and reporting the information."

That's the future that Thinfilm is working towards though a new partnership with PARC, a Xerox company. Last October, the two companies announced that they had created a printable chip using PARC's transistors and Thinfilm's memory to create a low-cost, low-power memory that's capable of being subject to programming logic.

This is where Thinfilm tags can come in handy. "If you’re going to add rewritable information to all the objects in the world, then that's going to scale with the number of things we dispose of every year," explains Sutija. "So we’re talking about trillions of tags per year. This is where silicon has challenges – it's hard to make chips smaller than 500 microns on the side, which puts a lower bound on how cheap silicon can be."

Thinfilm working prototype with all-organic circuits

What does that mean for our day to day lives? It means that, once Thinfilm's tags are integrated with sensing technology, food can let us know when its spoiled, based on temperature and ammonia levels. Food can also be tracked - from "farm to fork" - making it easier to both source ingredients and determine where, say, an E. Coli outbreak came from. That's just one possibility.

Another possibility that Thinfilm is actively working on is a bit more seasonally appropriate - using printable memory for toys and games.

"Right now we're working with some toy companies to integrate writable memory into a number of toys and games for 2012," says Sujita. "For example, in production right now are collectible cards that can have information placed into them via a reader. And other similar types of toys are in the works, too."

"Any hint as to which toy companies Thinfilm is working with?" I asked.

"I can't tell you that yet," Sutija laughed. "But I can assure you that you've heard of them."